1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed to a system that allows the contents of any disk to be read and written by any computer running any operating system and, more particularly, to an application program running on a host system that allows a user to access and modify disks having a file format suitable for an operating system foreign to the operating system of the host and carry the modified foreign disk back to the original system, thereby making disk file format transparent to the user.
2. Description of the Related Art
A conventional method of transferring data from a disk system 10 of a computer system 12 running one operating system, such as VMS with a corresponding first file format, to another disk system 14 of a second computer system 16 running another operating system, such as MS DOS with a corresponding second file format, is to transfer the data over a local area network (LAN) or over a telephone line system using modems 18 and 20 as illustrated in FIG. 1. The file format of a disk comprises two things, first, the directory structure of the files which is the information that describes where files are located, the relationship between the files and the files themselves and, second, the internal structure of a file such as the record format for text lines within the file. The method described above requires that the files be converted into a common transmission format and transferred over a transmission medium between the physically connected distinct computers 12 an 14. Another method is to store the data on a commonly formatted media such as tape and physically carry the tape between the different computers 12 and 14. Many smaller systems such as personal computers do not have tape facilities available and resort must be had to the network transfer method. Both of these methods are very slow and require hardware that may not be useful for other purposes.